'Striking nurses were offered a pay deal that amounts to a fart in the face'

14 April 2023 , 12:17

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NHS staff have been offered a pay rise equivalent to one whole can of baked beans every three hours

A few days ago, a GP explained the reason for a series of NHS strikes using the increased costs of a can of Heinz baked beans.

In 2008, when a can cost 40p, junior doctors earned the equivalent of 24 tins an hour, he said. Today, with beans at £1.40 (if you're lucky), they'd earn enough to buy just 10 cans an hour. If they actually ate that many they'd probably need to be hospitalised with ruptured rectums, but his point was it's not greed driving the NHS strikes, but simple necessity.

For nurses, who get paid less than doctors but work slightly fewer basic hours, the starting salary in 2008 worked out to 26 tins of beans an hour. Today, it's 7 .

And the 5% pay offer from the government which the nurses are expected to reject equates to about a third of a can more, in return for emotionally-fraught work in a collapsing service, laced with unpaid overtime, the threat of violence, and being a political punchbag.

When they were launched in the UK 1901, Heinz baked beans cost nine pence - equivalent to about £1.50 today, and were available only at Fortnum & Mason

The Prime Minister, who will pronounce himself hugely disappointed in the nursing union's failure to accept the unaffordability of their pay demands, earns the equivalent of 61 tins of beans an hour for presiding over a country where every public service is potholed - they're badly-maintained, underfunded, and too prone to damage by the weather.

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Meanwhile, the tax statement he published last month shows that in a single year, he earned 1.2million tins of beans purely from investments and capital gains: about 662 cans an hour, just for sitting on his bum.

His family's total wealth would buy 307million such tins, which is one big hill of beans. Laid end to end, they would circle the Earth. Consumed all at once, the resultant gas would probably propel us all into the heart of the Sun.

Yet it's paying the nurses, he'll say, that would cripple us.

"Am I making you ill?" (Leon Neal/AP/REX/Shutterstock)

Nurses, though, do not exist in the same kind of tax-avoiding, economy-hopping bubble as your average billionaire. They do not get to choose which country to pay their tax in, or ask for a private chat with a pal in government if the bill's looking a bit unreasonable this year.

Nurses do not buy private jets with firms based in the Cayman Islands. Nurses do not purchase homes through shell companies. Nurses - along with the junior doctors, physiotherapists, paramedics, porters, radiographers, receptionists, ambulance drivers and cleaners without whom the NHS would not exist and most of this country would have to resort to chewing roots for pain relief - spend their money, rather than roll in it.

They spend it on food from British businesses, they pay tax for British public services, they keep British residents alive for longer. Every time the government gives a public servant money, the public servants hands some of it straight back in income tax, National Insurance contributions, and many save for a pension which saves the state money in the long run, and supports our financial services industry.

Studies have shown that for every bean you pay someone in the public sector, the economy will get about 80% of it back, in tax, spending, and offsetting other costs. I have looked very, very hard, and I am not quite clear what we are getting back from Rishi.

"Please don't take me back to the shop" (POOL/AFP via Getty Images)

Yes, he pays his taxes - 21% of his hill of beans, last year, which is a much lower tax burden than most of us, who contribute about a third of our earnings on average.

The point of electing a rich man to run a country is surely that some of his magic touch rubs off. That somehow, you'll earn more just by being in his orbit, that he knows the benefits of wealth so will let you enjoy it, too.

But that forgets the fact that most rich people got that way because they didn't share their knowledge or expertise. Elon Musk would never devote his childlike attention span to world hunger, or literacy, or anything else that lies beyond the ken of a spoilt 7-year-old boy whose daddy has an emerald mine. Jeff Bezos is not about to post out free books, and no-one who owns a Bentley is going to stop for hitch-hikers.

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The only people who help the poorest in society are other people who are, or who have been, poor. Rishi could be the wisest, most compassionate and reasonable chap on the planet, but at his level of wealth he'll always have more money than sense, and to him a tin of beans is always going to be a monetary unit beneath his notice.

"Let's make this the defining image of my premiership" (PA)

To him, nurses are a spreadsheet; an electoral issue; a conundrum; a deal to make or break. To us, they're lifesavers, friends, family, a hand to hold, someone we clapped with genuine admiration and are grateful for every day. For a moment in the pandemic, we noticed the people who weren't as visible - the cleaners without whose efforts every doctor and nurse would be unable to save a single life, the volunteer drivers who take pressure off ambulances by taking people to appointments, the conductors, refuse workers, librarians who are a face, a reassurance, and a service we don't notice until it's gone.

Rishi hasn't taken the bus in decades. A library to him is a status symbol, and cleaners are all potential thieves who must be watched like hawks. I'm sure he's a very nice and clever man, and if he wants to spend his life swimming in baked beans then let him.

But telling the world that nurses must make a third of a can stretch a little further - that teachers must find a way to make ends meet from existing budgets that have to cover the increasing cost of beans for the children's lunch - that parents, pensioners, students, must just knuckle down while he fixes things by looking at the potholes and failing to understand any of the penny-pinching processes that created them - is... well, it's all a bit bloody rich, quite frankly.

Paying nurses is not a cost. It's like giving someone a plate of beans on toast, and them saying: "I've had a forkful, you can eat the rest." Paying doctors is not a zero-sum game. Each one of them provides hundreds of saved lives, every single year, and for those who look at the world like a spreadsheet the 120,000 junior doctors in the NHS are worth their weight in gold for the sheer number of cash-generating units they save for the taxman.

Teachers grow children into wealthier, more successful adults. Filling in the potholes enables people to shop, travel, visit, care, work, trade, and generally do all the things that our great-grandmothers couldn't in 1901, when they heard Mr Heinz had a fancy new can of beans on sale, but they didn't have a horse and carriage to get to Fortnum & Mason to buy the damned things.

The cost of food compared to wages led to the Peasants' Revolt of 1381, the Swing Riots of 1830, the Jarrow March in 1936. And if Sunak doesn't figure out soon that an economy profits from its people, he's going to be on the end of a very stormy summer of many more strikes.

Fleet Street Fox